Sony Pictures has bought the film rights to Mouthwashing, the 2024 indie horror game about five people stranded on a crippled space freighter with no food, no rescue and a cargo hold full of the one thing nobody needs. According to Deadline, Karyn Kusama is attached to direct, with her regular writing partners Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi adapting it. Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, the pair behind Sinister and The Black Phone, are producing with Vince Cheng. There is no cast and no release date yet.
If you haven’t played it, Mouthwashing was made by the small Swedish studio Wrong Organ and published by Critical Reflex on Steam in September 2024. You play Jimmy, co-pilot of the Tulpar, a freighter owned by the Pony Express company. A crash has left the ship drifting, the captain, Curly, maimed and unable to speak or move, and Jimmy in charge. The company is going bust, the crew were due to be laid off anyway, and the confidential cargo turns out to be mouthwash. Nothing but mouthwash. The Steam page sums up the mood as “God is not watching”, which is about as cheerful as it gets.
That premise sounds like a sketch, and the game knows it, but it became one of the most talked-about horror games of its year. It scored 88 on Metacritic, won Best Narrative at the Horror Game Awards, was nominated at the D.I.C.E. Awards for Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game, and sits at 95 per cent positive from around 25,000 Steam reviews. Dark Horizons reports it has sold nearly a million copies, which is quite something for a game with a deliberately crunchy, PlayStation One-era look.
Kusama is a smart choice. Jennifer’s Body and The Invitation are both about people slowly realising that the problem is in the room with them, and her work on Yellowjackets, which is all isolation, rationing and a group going very wrong, earned her Emmy nominations. Mouthwashing is a small crew turning on itself in a confined space, seen through the eyes of someone who may not be telling you everything. That is very much her territory. It is also her first science-fiction feature since Aeon Flux in 2005, a film famously taken out of her hands in the edit. Twenty-one years on, she gets another go at the future, with rather less leather.
The game also belongs to a long tradition of space horror about workers rather than heroes, from the bored crew of Dark Star to the Nostromo‘s engineers in Alien grumbling about their bonus shares. Britain’s contribution, Red Dwarf, played the same set-up for laughs: a stranded crew, no rescue, terrible food and someone in charge who really shouldn’t be. Mouthwashing is what happens when you play that straight.
The film’s real challenge is the storytelling. The game’s power comes from the way it shuffles its timeline and filters everything through Jimmy’s unreliable point of view, and it does not survive being spoiled, which is why we’re saying no more about it. Finding a cinematic equivalent of that perspective is the job. Encouragingly, Kusama, Hay and Manfredi have done something like it before: The Invitation keeps its audience trapped inside one man’s paranoia for most of its running time.
Since Five Nights at Freddy’s turned a cult indie horror game into a box-office fortune, studios have been shopping for the next one, so expect plenty more of these. Of the many games now heading for cinemas, though, this has the strongest story and by some distance the strangest cargo. Let’s just hope nobody at Sony decides it needs a bigger, louder ending. In space, nobody can hear you gargle.
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